Designing a cloud computing solution is a tricky endeavor. Regardless of the size or scope of your project, you will have to account for many different variables in your design. Not the least of which is how you will handle the virtual networking piece of the puzzle. In my experience, if there is one part of the design that can be considered fundamental to success or failure, it is the underlying virtual networking solution(s) that you choose to leverage. This will be a key element in determining how fast and far your environment can scale, as well as what types of use cases you can support. Why has “Software Defined Networking” (SDN) become such a buzz word in this industry over the last few years? Actually, let’s take this a step further and talk about the “Software Defined Datacenter” (SDDC). In SDDC, every part of your stack from compute, to storage, to networking is automated and controlled by policy and scripting. Like many of you, I have spent my...

Today I’d like to walk through the process of configuring dynamic routing between an NSX distributed logical router and an NSX edge. We will be using OSPF to advertise routes owned by the distributed logical router (DLR) to the edge device. In a previous post I discussed the advantages of leveraging the DLR to optimize East/West traffic. We will now be attaching an NSX edge device to provide North/South connectivity into the environment. In this design, all of your East/West traffic is handled by the DLR, and only ingress/egress traffic will be traversing the edge virtual appliance. It should become quite clear by this example exactly how well NSX can scale, and how it can be customized to support literally any network design. First lets start with a logical diagram of what this will look like when complete: (Credit: VMware) As you can see, we have a typical three-tier app design (web, app, and DB) attached to logical switches (VXLAN virtual wires) that then connect to the DLR. We...

VMware has done an excellent job in publicizing the features of its new NSX network virutalization platform. At least to vGeeks like myself. I am finding however that in the scope of various IT professionals that I interact with on a day-to-day basis, the level of familiarity is still quite limited. I suppose that is to be expected since it was only just announced at VMWorld last year, and unless you were included in the beta process, that would have been your first view of the product. SDN in general, and NSX specifically, completely changes the paradigm of how we think of (and interact with) network services. So this is really a lot to chew on. It’s not something you are going to read a white paper on, deploy, and call it a day. It will fundamentally change many of your business processes. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. What I would like to do is publish a few blog posts on specific features of the NSX...